The Democratic Presidential Ticket…for the moment. The Democratic nominee for President, George McGovern (right) and his Vice Presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton, at the 1972 convention. Less than three weeks later, McGovern would be looking for Eagleton’s replacement, a story told in Joshua M. Glasser’s sobering and cautionary The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis.

If you were voting in the New York Democratic Presidential primary in 1972, you didn’t vote for your preferred candidate. You voted for a slate of delegates from your Congressional district pledged to that candidate. That year Pop Mannion headed a slate of seven potential delegates pledged to George McGovern. The other slate on the ballot was headed by the boss of the Albany political machine, Dan O’Connell, and included six other stalwarts of the Democratic establishment, and they were all pledged to…Uncommitted.

Uncommitted won in a walk.

They never did commit. Not to McGovern, at any rate. At the Democratic convention, McGovern carried the New York delegation but not unanimously. In the end, if I’m remembering it right, seven New York delegates voted for Scoop Jackson.

Twelve years later, I’m in grad school in Iowa, and George McGovern is running for President again, mainly as a protest candidate trying to get his fellow Democrats to focus on issues dear to his heart, like hunger and poverty. He came to the University to speak and when he finished I chased after him because I wanted to tell him about Pop’s quixotic support for him back in ‘72.

I caught up with him in a stairwell, much to the bemusement of the two aides with him, and introduced myself. McGovern himself seemed a little wary. I guess he wasn’t used to people wanting to talk to him---his was a very lonely campaign that year---but he stopped and let me shake his hand and I started to tell him in a rush what I wanted to tell him, how Pop had been a fervent supporter and how his slate had been beaten by Uncommitted.

“Where was that?” McGovern asked.

“Albany, New York.”

He looked thoughtful for a second then said, “That was O’Connell and his people, right?”

I was taken aback. I didn’t expect him to even know about what went on in the politics of upstate New York, let alone remember it a dozen years later. But of course he remembered. And it wasn’t the sting of defeat still smarting that kept the memories fresh. It was that the consummate politician that he was remembered because as a consummate politician he knew that he always had to keep count.

It was also that those seven Uncommitteds represented one of McGovern’s several big problems in 1972. Old-school Democratic establishment types didn’t like or trust him. Not just because he was the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” And ten points to anyone who knows the ironic source of that characterization. But because his reforms of the Party’s nominating process were muscling them out in favor of women and minorities and younger, more liberal Democrats of all sorts and conditions.

And that, as Joshua M Glasser lays out the story in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis, helps explain how McGovern wound up with Thomas Eagleton as his running mate coming out of the convention and why it took as long as it did for McGovern to dump him after the news began to come out about Eagleton’s history of depression and the electroshock therapy he underwent to treat it, a decision McGovern turned out not to be too decent to make.

As the son of another decent man who was also a consummate politician (and, never mind the loss in the primary, a mostly winning one), I object to that characterization. It implies that there is something fundamentally indecent about being a successful politician or that McGovern somehow managed to be successful in spite of himself or that he was not a successful politician. Obviously, in the fall 1972, he wasn’t. Before that? Even one campaign after that?

George McGovern, a liberal Democrat, got himself elected Congressman from the very Republican and conservative state of South Dakota. He did that by building the Democratic Party in South Dakota, practically from scratch and single-handed. He got himself re-elected by beating back a challenge from a popular former governor. He lost in is his first try for the Senate, but then won the seat in 1962. He got himself re-elected in 1968 and re-elected again in 1974, only two years after South Dakota, along with forty-nine other states, had rejected its native son for President in a landslide of historic magnitude. He lost his Senate seat in 1980, a casualty of the Reagan sweep, and except for that symbolic run for President in 1984, was done with running for political office for the many years of life he had left to him. But that’s still a lot of political success for someone too decent for politics, and the point is that the people of South Dakota not send him to Washington for two terms in the House of Representatives and three in the United States Senate because they thought he was a decent guy.

They thought he was a decent guy who would get the job done for them.

They expected that he would represent their interests and wishes and be a skilled enough politician to get legislation passed and money allocated that would advance those interests and realize those wishes. And McGovern was glad to represent them. But South Dakota was a farming and ranching state and identified itself, accordingly, as rural, small town, Western, and, befitting a state of independent businessmen---ranchers, farmers, and the owners of the businesses that served them---and Republicans, pro business and therefore anti-union. Unions were big city, Eastern, anti-business, Democratic, and corrupt and corrupting. To represent South Dakota, McGovern had to be strongly pro-agriculture, which was easy, and, not anti-union, at least not aggressively so, but not the friend of labor most establishment Democrats were at the time. He kept his distance from labor leaders and when he saw union interests conflicting with the interests of his constituents he voted for the latter and against the former.

Naturally, union leaders and their friends and allies among party establishment types like the Uncommitted slate from Albany did not look kindly on McGovern’s candidacy. But McGovern needed union support, union money, union workboots on the ground, union votes. And that’s how he came to pick Eagleton.

McGovern’s ideal running mate was Ted Kennedy. Polls showed that McGovern’s best odds in the general election were with Kennedy on the ticket. But Kennedy turned him down, repeatedly. Glasser doesn’t go deeply into Kennedy’s reasons. He relays what Kennedy told McGovern: He’d promised the family that as the last surviving brother he would stay out of Presidential politics. And he points out that it was only three years after Chappaquiddick, which was probably a big reason Kennedy chose not to run for President himself. But it’s also likely that Kennedy had sized up McGovern’s chances against Nixon and decided to keep himself untainted by being part of a losing team for his own eventual run in ‘76 or ‘80. McGovern had others in mind, he barely knew Eagleton, despite having served with him in the Senate for three years. But the others turned him down too, and so did the obvious choices among McGovern’s top rivals for the nomination, Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. Meanwhile, his staff was looking around for someone who could appeal to the same constituencies as Kennedy. Someone pro-labor and someone labor was pro in return. Someone young. Someone Catholic.

The was the junior senator from Missouri. Tom Eagleton.

And…Eagleton was a product of the St Louis Democratic machine.

He wasn’t well-known outside Missouri, but Party bosses inside the state could vouch for him to Party bosses in other states.

Among the more interesting sections of The Eighteen-day Running Mate are the ones devoted to Eagleton’s swift rise in Missouri politics through a mixture of hard work, talent, family connections, and the skill and the willingness to play the game without becoming beholden to the wrong the people. Eagleton was every bit the politician as McGovern. He may not have been quite as decent a guy.

But before getting into anything else: The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is a cautionary tale for anyone nostalgic for the days when conventions decided who’d be the Parties’ nominees. McGovern arrived in Miami in ‘72 well ahead of his rivals (who included, besides Humphrey and Muskie, Scoop Jackson and George Wallace. That was also the year Shirley Chisholm ran.) in the delegate count but still short of the number he needed to win the nomination. McGovern and his staff had to work desperately hard to to round up the extra votes and just as hard to keep ones they had in hand from straying. Deals had to me made and unmade. Promises were exchanged, favors called in. Without having any of the obvious and popular favorites to offer, the Vice-Presidential pick became part of the wheeling and dealing, which made it difficult for McGovern’s people to identify and settle on a candidate. With the first roll call vote looming, they were scrambling and when Eagleton was finally offered the spot and accepted, they were left with very little time to vett him. In the end, they may have done even less due diligence than John McCain did when choosing Sarah Palin. “Vetting” amounted to little more than Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s political director, calling up Eagleton at his hotel in Miami and asking a few perfunctory questions that Eagleton later distilled as, “Any skeletons in your closet?” and more or less taking Eagleton’s word for it when he said there weren’t.

Eagleton wasn’t lying. Not in his own mind, at any rate. He just did not believe his having suffered from what he considered separate and isolated bouts of depression—as though depression was like the flu and something he was susceptible to---in the past but not anymore---as far as he was concerned, he was cured---and having been treated with intensive electro-shock therapy as skeletons. He believed it was nobody’s business but his own.

Eagleton was rushed to the nomination pretty much on his own say-so that he was fit for the job.

The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is not an insider account of the 1972 Presidential campaign in the vein of Game Change or Theodore White’s The Making of the President series. It’s a straight-forward, sober---and sobering---history of how a particular set of professional politicians tried to do their jobs during a period of crisis for them, not a gossipy account of how the game is played. There is no gossip. What could have been treated as gossip is only included because in this case the personal is inseparable from the political. And the most personal was the source of the political problem: the state of Tom Eagleton’s mental health.

People in 1972 knew that Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill both suffered from serious depression. But would they have judged that Eagleton deserved the same understanding and benefit of the doubt as a Lincoln or a Churchill? Put that way, it doesn’t seem likely, does it? And it didn’t seem likely to McGovern’s advisors. But what was more worrisome than the depression itself and the possibility that it might recur if Vice-President Eagleton became President Eagleton was how it had been treated.

Electroshock did not have the best public image.

It was barbaric.

It was the tool of mad scientists and torturers.

It was a method of last resort used only on the craziest of crazy people.

It didn’t work.

So it was thought people thought.

Which was ironic because electroshock therapy represented a more advanced or at least advancing view of mental illness, which was to see it as an illness with definite physical symptoms if not causes that could be treated medically. In the East, where Freud reigned supreme, mental illnesses---defined mainly as neuroses of various sorts---were assumed to be mental and their causes were assumed to be traumas to the psyche that had to be revealed by probing into a patient’s subconscious and unconscious under the guidance of a therapist who helped the patient talk his or her way around mental blocks and defenses to the root of the problem and, it was to be hoped, that would allow the patient to get control of the neurotic symptoms if not actually result in a cure. Talk therapy was fashionable. Anybody who was anybody saw a shrink, including, for a time when he was Vice President, Richard Nixon, a fact that wasn’t generally known but wasn’t exactly a state secret either. But it was more than a fashion. It was the method.

Contrary ideas had to go west, then, for a hearing. And many of the doctors and neuroscientists willing to listen were gathered in the teaching hospitals of the Midwest, like the ones where Eagleton sought help. His doctors didn’t see electroshock as an extreme measure. They saw it as an effective alternative to to the psychotropic drugs available at the time, of which there were few that worked and all of them had debilitating side effects. His doctors would have advised electroshock in almost the same way they’d have advised an operation to remove a tumor. Eagleton would have had good reason to think that having had electroshock was nothing to be ashamed of (which isn’t to say he didn’t worry about what voters might think. He kept not only his treatment but his episodes of depression secret from voters back home.) and good reason to think it had worked, that he was cured. In the several years between his last treatment and McGovern’s offering him a place on the ticket, he hadn’t suffered any more episodes.

He had good reason to think that because it was behind him it had no bearing on whether or not he was qualified to be Vice President of the United States.

He didn’t have good reason to think everybody else agreed with him, and he knew it, and although he didn’t feel he was lying to Mankiewicz when he said their were no skeletons rattling in his closet, good Catholic boy that he was, he must have known it was a Jesuit’s truth. He may not have been lying, but he was being deceptive, and when it came out, as it did in a hurry, McGovern had good reason for feeling he’d been deceived.

Glasser manages to be detailed and informative on the perceptions of mental illness and its treatment in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s without losing his narrative thread. The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is ultimately a dual political biography and portrait of two basically decent and well-intentioned but ambitious and determined men not being seen at their best. Glasser works hard at remaining objective---truly objective, not political journalist “Astronomers say the earth revolves around the sun, though some disagree objective.” He reports what as far as he's been able to determine actually happened, while withholding judgment...until judgment is called for.

Eagleton comes off as the more flawed and less admirable man, vain, dissembling (with himself as much as with anyone else), self-absorbed, selfish, and often immature. He seems to have had a habit of presenting himself in speeches as if he was talking about some other Tom Eagleton, a plucky, put-upon kid brother to himself he loved and admired and felt sorry for.

But Glasser seems more forgiving of Eagleton's flaws than of McGovern's, perhaps because he recognizes that McGovern was the better man and, as people are inclined to do with better men and women, expects more of him.

McGovern, as Glasser sees him, could be vain and self-deceptive in his own right. He was a decent man, but his problem wasn't that he was too decent for politics. His problem was that he was too proud of his reputation for decency for his own political good. He would hold off making a pragmatic political decision until he'd persuaded himself that it was the morally correct decision and he didn't blame himself for mistakes and failures if he could find a way to blame someone else for letting him down by not doing the decent thing as he saw it. He was compassionate and sympathetic towards Eagleton. His daughter Terry suffered from severe depression and, Glasser suggests, McGovern felt that giving up on Eagleton would be like giving up on Terry, something he would never do. He knew right away he needed to cut Eagleton loose and he had good grounds to do it. However Eagleton had convinced himself that he hadn't technically lied to Mankiewicz, he had in fact been deliberately deceptive.

But McGovern put it off in the hope that Eagleton would make the decision for him by doing the decent thing and withdrawing from the ticket. When Eagleton didn't and even began maneuvering to make it impossible foe McGovern to get rid of him, McGovern grew angry and resentful, but he still delayed in no small part in order to protect his image and his self-regard. When Eagleton finally got the push, instead of getting credit for patience and understanding, McGovern had created the impression that he was weak, indecisive, ultimately untrustworthy, and most damaging of all, exactly what cynics suspected, a posturing and self-serving hypocrite.

All these years later, it's probably impossible to know how much of an effect those eighteen days had on voters' perceptions of McGovern and on the election. Polling wasn't what it was to become and contemporary political reporting is unreliable because, as Timothy Crouse would soon reveal in The Boys on the Bus, the political press corps was well on its way to becoming what it is now, if it wasn't always what it is now, cynical, trivia-minded, horserace obsessed, easily distracted and bored, self-referential, convinced that what they gossiped about over lunch was what the American people were thinking about and caring about, and just plain not all that smart when it came to covering the issues at stake in a Presidential election. My own very unreliable recollection is that McGovern wasn't hurt as much by the fiasco with Eagleton as by the pathetic farce that followed as McGovern went begging for a credible replacement and was turned down by all and sundry until the Kennedys took pity on him and gave him Sargent Shriver.

But Glasser’s not all that concerned with questions along those lines, except in how they figured in the thinking of McGovern, Eagleton, and their advisors in the moment as they struggled to work their way through the mess they were in. In fact, the larger campaign and the issues at stake and what took place on the political and national and international scenes before the convention and after Eagleton's departure from the ticket are mostly left unexamined or only cursorily so.

As a result, Richard Nixon makes only a cameo appearance, Watergate gets barely a mention, the war in Vietnam is hardly discussed except as an issue that was important to McGovern personally and politically, and the cultural and political upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s that gave the impetus to McGovern's candidacy and were to a great measure its whole reason for being and which made it so alien and such a threat to Nixon’s Silent Majority---the anti-war movement and the rise of identity politics among women, African Americans, Hispanics, and gays---are kept offstage, sometimes reported on but never coming openly into view.

But this is because Glasser needs to keep his focus narrow to keep it sharp.

Glasser assumes his readers know, probably all too well, what else was going on around the very specific set of events that are his subject. The job he's given himself in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is to tell a particular story that is interesting and dramatic in its own right apart from its place in a larger history of those or these times. Whatever lessons there are to draw from this, whatever connections there are to be made to events then or now Glaser leaves up to us.

So…

In political science’s Department of How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin, students and scholars debate just how much influence a Presidential candidate’s choice of running mate have on the election.

I remember being glad and feeling…reassured when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore. To me, it said Clinton was serious about being President. It wasn’t just the economy, stupid. He was thinking about the national security and the environment and how to get get things done in Washington where Gore, although it’s hard to believe now, was highly regarded, something like the Democrats’ Paul Ryan, except he actually knew what he was saying. And I always considered Gore’s choice of a running mate a mistake. Joe Lieberman might have corralled the ticket some votes in Florida (not enough, as it turned out), but he was already a notorious quisling, having given aid and comfort to the Republicans during the Impeachment Crisis by being the only Democratic Senator to publicly condemn the President for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and he did it on the Senate floor. Gore, I thought, had picked Lieberman as a signal that he was his own man and had cut himself free from Bill Clinton, which, as far as I was concerned, meant he was cutting himself free from a major reason I was voting for him, to continue what Bill Clinton had started. John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards left me cold, but I was never much impressed by Edwards. That’s not 20-20 hindsight. Ask Pop Mannion. Once, when I was visiting the old homestead shortly after the Republican justices on the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush, Pop and I were speculating on who the Democrats could run in 2004 who’d have a chance against Bush. Pop asked me what I thought about Edwards and I said he reminded me too much of a television evangelist. But when Kerry picked him, I figured the points in Edwards’ favor were that he was young, Southern, and working class and he was meant to balance out Kerry’s elitist, New England, not exactly hip anymore image. But when Barack Obama tapped Joe Biden I was genuinely perplexed. Here, though, is where I made my bloomer, and it was the same bloomer I made when thinking about the other VP choices. I thought the object was always and mainly to impress me in my ill-fitting guise as an average voter or, at least, an average Democratic voter.

It’s still a question how much Sarah Palin hurt John McCain in 2008. I think the prevailing wisdom is settling on the idea that the damage was actually more of the shooting himself in his own foot variety. By rushing to pick someone who turned out to be so obviously and frighteningly unfit for any political office, let alone the one that put her next in line for President, without any serious attempt to vett her, McCain showed himself up as rash, reckless, thoughtless, and so desperate to be President he was willing to foist this idiot and lunatic on the nation. But here’s the thing. That idea began to develop after McCain had already shown himself up as rash, reckless, thoughtless, and desperate when the economy collapsed in mid-September. When it became clear what a horror show Palin was---and thank you, Tina Fey, because the political press corps was smitten and took years to become truly unsmitten---it confirmed what people were concluding about McCain based on his own behavior. But for a few weeks after the Republican convention, Palin helped McCain by firing up the base and keeping attention off of him, until he called it back himself. And I believe she continued to be a help right up until the election because she kept the base from abandoning him.

This is the insight I gained from The Eighteen-Day Running Mate. In trying to figure out the effect of a candidate’s choice of running mate on the election, first look at which constituency or constituencies within the candidate’s own party the choice was made to win over. I’m not sure it’s been all sorted out in McCain’s choice of Palin. At the time, it was assumed by the Political Press Corps---and said by some inside the campaign---that the hope was that a woman on the ticket would appeal to women in general and disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters in particular. If that was the reason, then Palin was bad for McCain from the start, because women did not like her. If the idea was that her supposed maverickyness complemented and highlighted his reputation as a maverick, then that didn’t work out quite they way it was expected. But if she was there to whip up enthusiasm for the ticket among the Right Wing rank and file, then she definitely did her job.

When Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, Democrats couldn’t contain their glee. They believed that Ryan’s reputation as a ruthless Social Darwinist intent on destroying Medicare and, eventually, Social Security---that is, that people knew and despised Ryan as, in Charles Pierce’s immortal words, a zombie-eyed granny-starver---would sink Mitt with just about any constituency you could name. But they forgot to name three within the Republican Party.

Christian Right. The Tea Party Right. And the Corporatist Right.

All three got Mitt’s message.

The general voting public probably takes note of the VP pick but then folds him or her into their image of the guy at the top of the ticket. For good, ill, or nil, he or she becomes part of the Presidential candidate’s identity. It’s just that Mitt Romney has turned out to be pretty adept at avoiding having an identity. He’s been more of his own logo for the brand of Super Save the Nation Oil (With All New Secret Ingredients) he’s selling. Most voters, I suspect, have forgotten Paul Ryan’s part of the mix.

But those three core constituencies hear Mitt’s real sales pitch loud and clear:

“Don’t worry about what I did back when I was governor of Massachusetts or things I had to say and have to say to appear moderate in order to fool the Lamestream Media. When I’m President, you will have my attention and my gratitude. I will owe you. And Paul Ryan will be there to make sure I pay you back.”

And that, the second part of it, with different and better intentions, is very similar to the message George McGovern meant to send to core Democratic constituencies with his choice of Thomas Eagleton:

“When I’m President, you will have my attention and my gratitude. I will owe you. And Tom Eagleton will be there to make sure I pay you back.”

As Glasser makes clear in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, it was politics, pure and simple, and not decency, that dictated that message. The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is a riveting and enlightening account of how it happened that the message never had a chance to get delivered.

Of all the words the people who hate President Obama use to call him an “other”, to avoid the word they really want to use but that they know ought to stick in their throats, to demonize and delegitimize and denigrate him, and to justify their contempt and their fury at a black man’s holding the office of President of their country---Kenyan, Socialist, Marxist, fascist, terrorist’s pal---the word they use least often is the one that actually had a measure of truth behind it.

Chicago.Not that they don’t use it. It just gets less emphasis because it doesn’t carry quite the same force of anger and vituperation. It doesn’t imply his otherness as much as those other words. There is a racist tinge to it. Chicago is a city and cities are where they live. But mainly cities are where Democrats live and vote, early and often and even after they’re dead. Cities are where Democrats run the show for their own personal gain. Cities are corrupt, city politicians are corrupt, and no city and no city’s politicians are more corrupt than Chicago.

That’s the rap on the Windy City, which supposedly got its nickname not from the winds blasting in from Lake Michigan but from the longwinded politicians fanning the town with their hot air, and it’s thanks to Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Boss, that this reputation was engraved on the living public’s imagination. Tying the word Chicago to Barack Obama is tying him to the Daley Machine, and that’s enough to give even good Democrats a pause or two. The President did learn the political trade in Chicago. The Daley Machine was broken by the time young Barry Obama arrived in town to take up work as a community organizer, and the truly relevant figure in his political biography is Harold Washington not Richard Daley, but he has close ties to the living Daleys, close enough to have made one, William, his chief of staff for a while, a blessedly short while. (See? What did I say about even good Democrats?) And then, of course, there’s Rahm.

So there are reasons Chicago ought to work as a smear against the President and you’d think the Right would hit with it harder. The problem is that it doesn’t otherize him to the degree they want to otherize him. In fact, just the opposite.

Chicago isn’t just the Daleys. It’s the Cubs. It’s the White Sox. It’s the Bears. It’s Michael Jordan! It’s deep dish pizza. It’s sweet home to the Blues Brothers and his kind of town to Sinatra. It’s Mrs O’Leary’s cow, who did not cause the fire, but never mind. It’s Carl Sandburg’s city of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world, home of Carson’s Ribs, immortalized in an episode of M*A*S*H as Adam’s Ribs, for whose specialty characters would walk all the way in from Joliet on their knees in the snow. It’s Al Capone and John Dillinger and the Roaring ‘20s, and what’s more American than our fascination with gangsters?

Baseball. Apple pie. Chevrolet. And…corrupt politicians.

They’re everywhere. Southern small town pols are notorious. Northeastern suburbs have their fair share of corruption too. There’s an upscale suburb close to us whose supervisor is being investigated for arson, the suspicion being that he arranged a fire to cover up evidence of a dozen instances of his robbing and bilking his constituents. And he was re-elected with this going on. By voters who knew he was robbing and bilking them. But, what the heck, the roads get plowed…by the highway department run by his brother. In towns and cities where things aren’t corrupt or aren’t as overtly corrupt, it’s because rival factions keep each other from laying sole hands on the spoils or powerful bosses make sure they have a say in every bribe and payoff and scam. Things aren’t as wide-open as they once were, but it can still be the case that “honest” politicians are the ones who wait until after leaving office to collect their payoffs or the ones who are most subtle and least overtly greedy when they practice what the old-time Tammany boss George Washington Plunkitt defined as “honest graft,” getting rich off of public works projects that are actually necessary and good for their constituents.

And Republicans as well as Democrats have been good at lining their pockets this way. That’s what Daley did. But he may not have been the most corrupt mayor of Chicago ever. That distinction may belong to a Republican. Willam Hale “Big Bill” Thompson. Who was mayor when Al Capone ran the city’s underworld and a good deal of the rest of it, as well.

Capone was said to have three portraits hanging on his office wall. George Washington’s. Abraham Lincoln’s. And Big Bill Thompson’s.

The basis of Capone’s affection for Thompson was Prohibition. Thompson opposed it, which didn’t make him a rarity among big city mayors at the time. But unlike most of the others he didn’t even make a show of enforcing the law. In fact, he promised to do the opposite.

“When I’m elected we will not only reopen places these people have closed,but we’ll open ten thousand new ones…. No copper will invade your home and fan your mattress for a hip flask.”

Once in office, he not only kept his promise, but he seems to have regarded Prohibition as a government program to supplement the incomes of cops, judges, and politicians, himself included. Bribes and payoffs were a form of sales tax.

That was during Thompson's second go round as mayor. His first time through--- he served two terms between 1915 and 1923---he made his money and his reputation as a politician with his hand in the till the old -fashioned way, by straight-forward skimming, not scrupling, apparently, between honest and dishonest graft. Thompson was a builder. We meet him in City of Scoundrels, Gary Krist’s engaging narrative history of twelve very bad days during Thompson’s second term, proudly presiding over the opening of the Monroe street drawbridge and Krist credits him with encouraging and initiating the developments and improvements, including Michigan Avenue's Miracle Mile, that made Chicago into the most architecturally advanced and inspiring cities in the United States. But he promised far more than he delivered, gave the go ahead and financing to projects that were never completed or in many cases never even started, with the money appropriated disappearing into many pockets including Thompson's own, and did not bother to check if the city could actually pay for any of it.

But during those twelve days that are the focus of City of Scoundrels, Thompson was too busy running his city to concentrate on profiting by it.

Running it?

Just trying to hold it together.

The trouble started during a heat wave in late July of 1919 with the very first Goodyear blimp crashing in flames on top a bank in the Loop. It continued with the disappearance of six-year old Janet Wilkinson and the citywide manhunt for who the police were sadly sure would turn out to be her molester and murderer. Then there was a transit strike, and then came five days of racial riots that left dozens dead, hundreds injured, and much of the South Side's African American neighborhoods burnt and looted.

Thompson was the son of well-to-do parents, a star athlete in high school who skipped college to go to work on ranches in Nebraska and Wyoming. By the time he became mayor, the only trace of the star athlete he’d been was how he’d gone to fat in the way many former linemen and heavyweight boxers do. He liked to wear a Stetson to remind people he’d once been a real cowboy, but when he saddled up for parades and campaign appearances, the sympathy of the crowds was with the horse. In those days there was still reason for Republicans to think of themselves as belonging to the Party of Lincoln, but the party was already divided between corporatists and money men, whom Thompson openly despised and defied, and progressives of the likes of Theodore Roosevelt brand, reformers, do-gooders, and good government types, and Thompson was not one of those either. He was a populist who didn’t believe in good government or using government to do good. He believed that it was a good…as long as it was useful. At a time when Republicans tended to see immigrants and their children either as infections or as projects for improvement, Thompson saw them as people who needed jobs and good schools and safe streets.

Or maybe he just figured that the surest way to buy their votes was to give them jobs and good schools and safe streets. Promise them those things, at least.

It didn’t hurt him with his Irish and German constituencies that he was an outspoken Wet and opposed Prohibition. To his surprise and chagrin, it didn’t help him as much as he expected when he opposed America’s entry into the Great War in Europe. It got him branded “Kaiser Bill” and there was concern (or hope, depending on how you felt about him) that accusations of a lack of patriotism would hurt him as he prepared to run for re-election in 1918.

But Thompson had another constituency he’d been cultivating while his political rivals, Democrats and Republicans, either ignored them or outright despised and dismissed them.

African Americans.

As an effect of the Great Migration that was bringing black people up from the South in search of jobs in Northern factories and some measure of escape from Jim Crow, Chicago had quickly growing African American population, whom Thompson courted with promises of jobs and public works projects in their neighborhoods, promises he often kept. He appointed African Americans to important positions in his administration, as well. And when he campaigned he was open in his appeals to black voters. This was tricky politically for him. Besides racial antagonisms, his black voters and his white ethnic voters were economic rivals. White workers tended to be union members while black workers were generally non-union (often because they were excluded from the unions). He managed the trick well enough to get himself re-elected, but it became an even larger and more dangerous problem when the riots began.

As you would expect, the riots, which began when a group of black teenagers swimming in the lake crossed an imagined line in the water and a white thug threw a rock that knocked one of the swimmers unconscious causing him to slip under the water and drown, take up the largest sections of City of Scoundrels. They went on for nearly a week, ranged over wide swaths of the city, caught thousands up in their violence, and caused Chicago’s second great fire.

The sections of City of Scoundrels covering the riots are harrowing and informative, especially if like me you didn’t know anything about this part of Chicago’s history. But they aren’t the most entertaining sections. Not that riots are entertainments or that nonfiction writing about riots and the attendant deaths and destruction ought to be entertaining in the way of writing about the Battle for Helm’s Deep. But there’s no reason it shouldn’t entertain readers by engaging their sympathies and stirring their emotions. It should be more than interesting. It should excite our interest. And the best way to do that, in nonfiction as well as fiction, is to give readers people to identify with and care about. Krist does a fine job of laying out the terrain and explaining the situation as it unfolds and leading us through the confusion and tumult. But there’s a distance in the presentation, as if we’re hearing about the riots from reporters who can’t get past the police cordons and are relaying what they’re being told by officials who are relaying what they’ve been told by other officials who are too busy trying to do their jobs to keep track exactly of what’s going on. Effectively, the sections on the riots read like a summarization of an official report pieced together from second and third hand reports well after the fact. The people involved appear more or less as statistics. So and so was beaten. So and so shot. So and so’s house was burned down. So and so was arrested along with…The neighborhoods bearing the brunt of the violence are located more than describe and treated as scenes of crimes or accidents instead of places where people lived, worked, and died.

Most of Chicago’s African Americans lived in neighborhoods on the South Side in an area that taken together was known as the Black Belt, and that’s where the rioting was concentrated. But we don’t get much of a sense of what it was like to live in the Black Belt under normal circumstances let alone during a nearly week long series of riots. Krist presents the Black Belt more as an object of sociological and historical study than as a place alive and bustling at a particular point in time with its own particular culture and ways of doing business, enlivened by the comings and goings of particular people with their own particular interests, passions and concerns. We see the Black Belt from the outside, through the eyes of outsiders, white outsiders. Krist’s two main eyewitnesses to the riots are Carl Sandburg, who was working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and Sterling Morton, an heir to the Morton Salt fortune who was a lieutenant in the state militia that summer, and Sandburg’s reports from the scene are…reports, and Sterling, along with his unit and the rest of the militia sent to backup the police if the mayor called on them, spent the first several days waiting and then when the militia marched in at last, he was naturally more focused on the immediate dangers to him and his men than on gathering information about the people he was there to protect or round up. Morton viewed the Black Belt as a battleground not a part of his hometown.

So we don’t get anyone speaking for the neighborhoods and the people who live there or speaking for themselves as people living in the neighborhood. In fact, Chicago’s African American community has practically no voice of its own in the book. The journalist and activist Ida B. Wells (whom Krist refers to throughout by her full legal name, Wells-Barnett) has a prominent role in City of Scoundrels, and she lived on the South Side and was active in helping victims during the riots, but Krist mostly has her speaking in her role as a public figure and rarely as a private citizen of a city coming down around her ears. And in her public persona she often comes across as representing a party and community of one.

That’s a big chunk of the city to leave voiceless. And it gets at something I would have liked to have more of. Characters. City of Scoundrels is populated by many biographies but not enough characters, that is, we’re introduced to a lot people and get to know them through the facts of their lives, but we meet fewer people who speak for themselves and come off as having real lives off the page and in the process give us an intimate sense of what it was like to live in the city of Chicago a hundred years ago.

Two of the most alive characters, in that sense, are Thomas Fitzgerald, the suspect in Janet Wilkinson's abduction and murder---that's not a spoiler. From the beginning of her part of the book, there's not a doubt about what happened. The details are too familiar from the countless similar cases that make the news to this day. In newspaper interviews neighbors of the suspect and Janet's family sound depressingly like any you'd hear on Nancy Grace.---and a diary-keeping University of Chicago student who is the ingenue of City of Scoundrel's romantic subplot.

Twenty year old Emily Frankenstein (Yes. Really. Frankenstein. There’s more. Her doctor father was named Victor!) was the daughter of a prosperous Jewish family secretly engaged to a recently demobbed soldier her parents disapproved of because of his working class background and his growing interest in Christian Science. Emily wasn't comfortable with the Christian Science thing either, but she was convinced she could argue him out of it and improve him in other ways as well.

Emily's account of their courtship is lively, entertaining, and, for a twenty year old in love, psychologically astute. But, understandably, her focus is herself and her attention doesn't range far beyond her own front porch, and she was protected from the calamities and tragedies shaking the city by privilege and distance. We learn a lot from her about what it was like to be Emily Frankenstein. We don't get much of a picture of what it was like for Emily Frankenstein to be out and about in Chicago in the summer of 1919.

We get a much more detailed and illuminating picture of the daily life of the city and how ordinary people lived and worked and interacted in the sections on Janet Wilkerson's murder, since the investigation depended on tracing the comings and goings of Janet and her friends and family and their neighbors on the day of her disappearance.

The most vivid sections of City of Scoundrels, the ones with the most chills thrills, excitement, and, to me, news, are also ones in which Chicago and its people come to life, although, horrifyingly, in a number of cases, in the moments before they are burnt or crushed to death, and those are the sections dealing with the flaming crash of the airship The Wingfoot Express on top of Illinois Trust and Savings just as the bank was closing up for the day.

But it’s Big Bill Thompson who dominates the book, casting his hulking, cowboy-hatted shadow over every page. He was a colorful and amusing personality although not all that interesting a person. He doesn't seem to have left much of an account of himself or attracted the interest of any writers in a way that made them want to write seriously about him, the way Richard Daley would come to obsess Mike Royko. Mostly Thompson inspired the broadest satire or the narrowest sort of demonization. If there's a book out there like Royko's Boss or A.J Liebling's classic The Earl of Louisiana, Krist doesn’t make a lot of use of it. The result is that Thompson doesn't have much of a voice in City of Scoundrels. We "hear" him mainly through his speeches and public pronouncements in which he tended to mix populist rabble rousing with patriotic bombast typical of the day and the professional politician's usual forms of boasting and self-flattery. Thompson doesn't come across as intellectually or emotionally engaged in any of the events Krist is chronicling, except in a reverse way during the riots when he was trying his damnedest not to be engaged---he couldn't figure out how to appear active and in charge without alienating his white and black voters. The police were overwhelmed. The governor had the state militia ready to march in. All he was waiting for was for Thompson to ask for the help. But the governor was a political rival, and Thompson wanted his police department to get the credit for saving the city.

But people did write about him. He made news. And while. as he presented himself in public, he was all show and he seems to have had no friends or intimates of a literary bent who recorded his private thoughts and feelings, his enemies couldn't say enough about him. None of what they had to say was kind or even grudgingly complimentary. But what they did say and write (and you can imagine the most even-tempered of them writing much of what Krist quotes with red faces and clenched jaws) leaves no doubt that Thompson was very, very, very good at playing politics.

Few of his opponents and rivals came away from any dealings with Big Bill feeling they'd got the better of him. Often they came away feeling as dirty as they thought him. Nobody believed Thompson represented anyboby's best interests but his own. Nobody except the voters. Which led to a number of his enemies among the Chicago and Illinois political and economic elite giving vent to the not always well-suppressed suspicion, held by many elitist reformers regardless of party, that the problem with democracy is that the little people get to thinking they run things.

It wasn't a difficult leap from thinking the mayor was corrupt to thinking the people who voted for him were corrupt.

Democracy, as practiced in Chicago under Big Bill Thompson, and in every city for that matter, was a system by which the poor and undeserving voted to give themselves unearned goods and services bought with rich and deserving men's money.

And there you have it, the roots of Mitt Romney' 47 %, of the fear and loathing and self-righteous indignation behind Republican legislatures passing laws designed to keep people, particularly city people, those people, from voting, of some of the small town and suburbanite Tea Party types’ feeling that their country has been stolen from them, of the corporatist Right's contempt for the Welfare state and democracy itself as forms of theft.

It can all be summed up in that one word. Chicago.

Big Bill's second stint as mayor lasted just one term. When Democrat Anton Cermak defeated him in 1931, the Chicago Tribune delivered Thompson's political eulogy:

For Chicago Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy.... He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character.

Of course I believe that the President not even in spite of but because of the political lessons he learned in Chicago is no Big Bill Thompson, but still Thompson is a relevant figure in this year's election and that makes City of Scoundrels not just an interesting and entertaining book but a useful one for understanding some of what's still going on today.

Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and Sam Rockwell, as three of the at least seven psychopaths in Martin McDonagh’s absurdist thriller Seven Psychopaths, take time out from running from the bad guys out to kill them for dognapping the boss’ Shih Tzu to discuss the finer points of moviemaking.

The answer is one.

I'm just not sure which one.

Actually, I'm not even sure which characters in Seven Pychopaths to count as psychopaths. The trailer and the ads count two characters who barely register as characters in the movie. Meanwhile, as I sat in the theater thinking maybe I'll start to like this, maybe it'll grow on me, maybe if I sit here long enough I'll figure out what's going on and what the director is trying to do, and then I'll like it, I counted enough other characters I'm pretty sure psychiatrists would diagnose as psychopathic to bring the count of the dangerously insane up to at least nine, and there were enough signs that the count might be much higher and include every character with at least one line of dialog.

Of course, there's one obvious candidate for the psychopath responsible for this screwiness is writer and director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), who maybe wouldn't object to being lumped in with the psychopaths who populate his movie since, based on there being no sane people in his characters' universe, a theme of Seven Psychopaths is that we're all psychopaths.

That is to say, the world, according to McDonagh, is a mad, violent, and bloody place, full of people pursuing their mad ends with no regard for the feelings, concerns, needs, or existence of the other mad men and mad women they share the planet with.

The lesson here isn't that the way to survive in a world gone mad is to go mad yourself and create your own mad reality, although that's what people tend to do, in life and in the movie. The proper response is to go sane and create your own little bubble of sanity around you and yours, which, by the way, is the lesson of all Dickens' novels, andI don't doubt McDonagh has read his Dickens. The best way to build this bubble, though, is through art, particularly the art of storytelling, on paper, sure, but also, emphatically, on film.

McDonagh's main character, played by Colin Farrell, is an Irish screenwriter adrift in Hollywood named, not self-referentially, I'm sure, Martin, who is working---trying to work---on a screenplay for which he has a title but no plot and no characters.

The title?

Seven Psychopaths.

Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh's film not Martin's barely started screenplay, is a movie about what movies are good for that uses itself as its own prime example. Characters comment on the art of moviemaking in self-referential ways that bring them very close to breaking the fourth wall. They don't know they're in a movie. They just can imagine their lives as a movie, which is to say they can imagine themselves as characters in a movie, and at the moment the movie they're imagining themselves in seems very much like this one.

At any rate, Martin is in no condition to create any bubbles of sanity, on paper, on film, in life. He has a drinking problem. A blackout drunk with a habit of self-destructive meanness when deeply under the influence, rather then building bubbles, he pops them. Slowly, though, as the movie unfolds, it begins to dawn on him, that somebody is trying to help him out by building a bubble of sanity around him in which he'll be able to settle down and write. The trouble is that that somebody has a very different conception of sanity than Martin.

Fortunately for him, although Martin himself doesn't see much fortunate in it, he has a friend looking out for him, a usually unemployed because he's unemployable actor named Billy Bickle. Yes, the allusion's deliberate. There’s no doubt Billy’s one of McDonagh’s seven psychopaths. Billy (played by Sam Rockwell) has no trouble getting parts, he just can't keep them. Creative differences are always arising between him and his directors, which Billy tries to resolve by beating up the directors. But he's determined to help Martin complete his screenplay. All he asks from Martin is a little help escaping from the gangster whose beloved Shih Tzu Bonny he's dognapped.

Billy has a side business snatching doted-upon dogs and then collecting the rewards offered by the distressed and desperate owners. His partner in this enterprise is Hans (Christopher Walken), an elegant and gentle man who is using his share of the take to pay for his wife's cancer treatments. That's not why he's in the dognapping business. Hans hasn't done an honest day's work in twenty years. For much of that time, he was involved in a long-term project that required the flexible schedule a life of crime provided. Crook that he is, Hans and his wife are deeply religious, good Catholics whose faith, already being tested by her illness, is about to undergo a severe trial when the gangster comes looking for his dog and revenge.

Martin McDonagh is the brother of James Michael McDonagh who wrote and directed The Guard, one of my favorite movies from last year, and it’s clear that the brothers are on the same wave length. Seven Psychopaths shares themes, elements, and sensibilities with The Guard, including the Pulp Fiction trope of criminals holding pseudo-intellectual arguments about life and culture while out on the job. Both movies accept the world is a mad place peopled by madmen and madwomen who don’t seem to notice or care that they and the world and everybody else in it are mad, and both movies feature main characters who have built little bubbles of sanity around themselves. The difference is that in The Guard it all matters. And it matters because The Guard treats itself as a realistic portrayal of how the world is, at least as taking a realistic look at how the world can sometimes seem because it in fact often is that way. In Seven Psychopaths, this is more of a conceit, an idea McDonagh is playing with that he hopes we’ll enjoy playing with along with him. Which is fine. It is enjoyable. Sometimes. But it happens too often that the characters are puppets to the conceit and that makes it hard to care what happens to them. If it’s all just an idea to play around with, what does it matter if a character dies simply to support the idea?

Bodies pile up in Seven Psychopaths, most of them as the result of extremely violent and gruesome deaths. I couldn’t decide if McDonagh was using the gore to distract us from the deaths themselves---using violence to insulate us from the violence---or to distract us from the comedy that surrounds the violence or to make sure we don’t make the mistake of thinking he means the violence to be funny. Probably a bit of all three, with an emphasis on the last one. But I couldn’t help and still can’t help suspecting that he was also using it to make us pay attention, to make us care about what was happening to his characters or what might happen because he sensed that without the shock we otherwise wouldn’t.

It’s not that McDonagh treats his characters only as puppets. But he could have done a better job of hiding that they are puppets. There are several ways he could have gone about this. The one I thought of off hand, though, was that he could have had something important at stake at the center of his plot. Frankly, who cares if Martin or any screenwriter finishes a screenplay? (This was Nicolas Cage’s character’s---or one of his characters’---problem in Adaptation, which might have been an influence on McDonagh, and if it was, good on him. But it was not why we were concerned for that character…or characters. For one thing, we were concerned that they might not be two characters.) It’s funny that Billy and Hans are so worried about Martin’s being unable to finish his screenplay that they do their best to help him write it while they are running for their lives from the gangster. But one joke, even if it’s a good one, isn’t enough to build a plot around.

What probably would have done the trick is if McDonagh had made the gangster chasing them less of a psychopath instead of the most psychopathic of all the psychopaths. If he had a reason to want to kill them besides his insane love for his dognapped Shih Tzu. If snatching Bonny had been Billy’s first mistake. If, that is, there’d been a real crime Billy and Hans and Martin, once he’d been dragged into it, were thwarting by having dognapped Bonny.

As it is, Charlie Costello makes Al Pacino’s Tony Montana look like a model of self-control. The only reason Charlie doesn’t kill everybody who makes him angry---and just about everybody does---is that along with his unnatural affection for his dog, he’s made a fetish of his silver-plated .45 automatic which has a tendency to misfire two out of three times he pulls the trigger. Charlie is not dangerous in the way of gangster movie gangsters. He’s dangerous in the way of horror movie monsters. He’s entirely without reason or motive, implacable in his hatreds, and relentlessly violent. And on top of all this, he’s meant to be funny.

Woody Harrelson does his best to make him funny, and because he’s Woody Harrelson he often does. Also, because he’s Woody Harrelson, he does a good job of making Charlie creepy. But the only thing truly scary about Charlie as a character is our fear that if his gun does go off we’re going to see somebody’s head explode at close range. As a villain in his own right, Charlie doesn’t matter.

He does matter, though, when he’s in the company of his chief lieutenant and enforcer Paulo, who, as played by Zeljko Ivanek, may be the only character in the movie who is not a psychopath. No small feat, considering Paulo is a professional killer. But he has reasons and motives for killing that are, well, reasonable. For one thing, he understands that a good criminal organization needs a boss who is organized, and he’s figured out that the best way to keep Charlie focused is to let him go nuts now and then, as long as he gets done whatever nutty thing he’s decided to do quickly and relatively neatly. I got a kick out of seeing Ivanek, a longtime favorite character actor who usually plays more intellectual, softer-edged, and elegant types (like the ADA in Homicide), playing a truly tough movie tough guy. He has Paulo treating Charlie like an exasperating little brother who persists in doing the kind of stupid things they learned as kids not to do, and through Ivanek’s performance Charlie gains humanity and therefore some measure of seriousness as a villain. Charlie starts to matter to us because he matters to Paulo and he starts to become funnier because Charlie is not funny to Paulo. And he starts to feel truly dangerous because Paulo is truly dangerous.

But that’s what good actors do for each other. They make each other’s performance better. And this is true for the all the main players. The main male players, although that amounts to saying the same thing, and I’ll get to that, shortly. I was particularly taken with Walken here. I can’t think of very many other performances of his I would describe as a good example of how to underplay a part. What’s more, I can’t think of any other role he’s played I’d describe as a truly good person. Hans is by no means a saint. But he is what a man who knows himself to be deeply flawed trying to follow the example of the saints would look and sound like. It’s a quiet, gentle, sane performance, and not just for Walken. Hans may or may not be one of the movie’s psychopaths, but if he is, he’s a recovering one. I can’t say, and in order to say I’d have to undertake a Christopher Walken retrospective, not something that has all that much of an attraction for me, but I think his performance here and, from what I’ve seen, in the upcoming Stand Up Guys, will give future critics and fans a sense that there’s been some shape to his eccentric and unruly career.

Sam Rockwell’s career already has a discernable shape. In one role after another, he’s been able to find and make clear what’s appealing in annoying characters without losing track of what’s annoying about them. That’s what he does here with Billy. Not only does he make us see what’s appealing in Billy, he makes us see that what’s appealing is also admirable.

Colin Farrell’s main job is to make it halfway plausible that an intelligent and competent grownup could get himself into the mess he finds himself in. He makes Martin just sane enough to understand he’s in trouble, but just unhinged enough that he not only can’t he think his way out of it, he might actually have thought his way into it and it’s not all Billy’s fault, as he’d like to believe.

Tom Waits shows up holding a rabbit and makes us forget the rabbit the same way we forget he’s wearing a jacket. Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg have fun together in their one scene paying homage to Reservoir Dogs. Harry Dean Stanton doesn’t have a single line but who cares. He doesn’t need lines. He’s Harry Dean Stanton.

At one point in the movie, Billy and Hans have an argument over the direction Billy thinks Martin’s screenplay should take and the role women play in Billy’s conception of things. Hans objects that in Billy’s version of the story the women characters are passive and inarticulate. They not only need the male characters to come to their rescue, they need them to speak for them. Billy defends himself on the grounds that he’s being realistic. It’s a hard world for women, he says. Hans agrees, to a point. Yes, he says, “It is a hard world for women, but most of them I know can string a sentence together.” This is one of the points where Seven Psychopaths seems to be commenting on himself, because the women in this movie, although they can string a sentence together, aren’t given that many sentences to string. As Hans’ wife Myra, Linda Bright Clay is given the most and she makes the most of what she’s given. But Abie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko are practically ignored, and Gabourey Sidibe is worse than wasted. She’s made a fool out of.

McDonagh’s treatment of his female characters is something I definitely did not like about Seven Psychopaths and using Hans to apologize for it on his behalf doesn’t get him off the hook. But this gets me back to the question, did I like the movie?

As I said, I didn’t. At first. I sat there thinking I would. But whenever I came close, something happened that convinced me I didn’t like it. Then something else happened that made me think I did. Then I didn’t again. Then I did, and then…I still did.

At about two-thirds of the way through I realized that I’d been enjoying the movie for a while now and from there onto the end I kept liking it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young Bruce Willis and Bruce Willis as an older Joseph Gordon-Levitt share the leading role of Joe, a hitman in the future who kills hitmen from the future’s future, in Rian Johnson’s sci-fi film noir, Looper.

It has the right elements. The story's set in a city corrupt enough that the underworld bleeds into the daily life of the city without anyone, including the cops, taking much notice. There's a morally compromised protagonist who seems too smart and in some measure too decent to be doing what he's doing. There's a good woman who inspires him to at least consider changing his ways. There's a genial crime boss who is good at making the case that changing his ways is not something the protagonist would have an easy or pleasant time doing and, anyway, the situation isn't so terrible, is it, considering the pay and the perks and the benefits? There's the protagonist's weaselly pal who puts him in a bind that makes him have to choose between doing the stupid but decent thing and the smart but rotten thing. And there's the antagonist who is the protagonist's moral mirror, his doubled self in whom he can see either the prospect of his own redemption or his utter damnation, in whom, so to speak, he can read the future. It just happens that in Looper this double isn't a shadow version of the protagonist's self. He is himself.

Oh, and time travel has been invented.

Or will be invented. Which amounts to the same thing.

I'm going to try very hard to avoid spoilers, but I'm assuming you know the premise. It's 2044. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hitman providing a very specialized service. He's a looper. Loopers hire out to whack criminals sent back from thirty years in the future by mob bosses there who want to dispose of witnesses, rivals, traitors, snitches, and screw-ups without a trace. The police in the future appear to be better at their jobs or are less corrupt than the cops in Joe's present and care when people are murdered, even bad guys. There's a crackdown too, it seems, because the bosses need to tie up loose ends and among those loose ends are the future selves of loopers like Joe. It's part of a looper's contract that his last hit will be his own future self.

You'd think this would create qualms in the loopers. It's one thing to kill strangers. It's another to kill the person you know best. You'd also think, knowing what's in store for them down the road, loopers would prepare and even take some steps to avoid it. But director and screenwriter Rian Johnson deals with that by playing with one of the paradoxes of time travel. You might be able to hide in the future, but the bosses know exactly where to find you in the past and whatever they do to you then is going to affect you now by changing the course of your life in between for the worse.

But Johnson also handles this on moral and psychological levels. You have to figure that hired killers are people to whom other people aren't real and that might be because they aren't real to themselves. As Joe tells us in the sparingly used, effectively placed hardboiled narration, "This job does not attract the most forward-thinking people."

That's a self-indictment, of course, but the fact Joe's self-aware enough to make it is going to cause Joe trouble, in the future and in the present. Future Joe is Joe grown smarter and more self-aware and more real to himself. And even though Future Joe is thirty years older, he has something Joe in the present doesn't think of himself as having much of, a future, and a future that matters to him. Which is to say, Future Joe has a reason to live and that means he has a reason not to let his past self kill his present self.

Johnson does an excellent job of setting up his future world of thirty years from now. It's different enough to be recognizably not our world. There are things going on that make this a place we would not be comfortable in and Johnson hints at what might have happened that brought this dystopia about, but he doesn't dwell on any of it and it very quickly ceases to matter except as a plausible background for the twists and turns of the plot. Otherwise, 2044 might as well be now or 1954. (Johnson comes up with an offhand but very funny explanation for why people in the future talk and dress like people now.) I liked how Johnson builds this world right away, in just a few quick scenes, while setting right to work telling his story. But maybe the best thing about Johnson's futuristic cityscapes is that they are created suggestively through small design and costume touches without heavy reliance on green screens and cgi.

And Johnson is one of the most patient directors going. He takes a long time to introduce his second male lead, which means he takes a long time to bring the actor who is in fact his star on screen, and he takes an even longer time to introduce his leading lady, so long that I forgot Emily Blunt was in the movie. Her showing up came as a jolt and a very pleasant surprise.

Taking the extra time to introduce Joe's future self---and Bruce Willis---is important because it is Old Joe who needs to be introduced not Willis. This is Gordon-Levitt's movie because it is Joe's story and there are not two Joes. There's just the one who happens to be played by two actors. Gordon-Levitt isn't playing a younger Bruce Willis. Willis isn't playing a young Gordon-Levitt. They're both playing Joe, and what Johnson patiently sets us up for is to see Old Joe, when he finally appears, not as the man Levitt's Joe might become but as the man he already is, just with less hair. (There are a couple of wordless bald jokes at Willis' expense worked in.) Being suddenly presented with a different version of Joe who is in fact not different, even though he travels with a higher body count and a longer list of sins on his moral ledger, forces us to re-evaluate our rooting interest in Joe.

Just what, we have to ask, are we rooting for him to do? Why should we root for him to do it? Why should we root for him at all?

There was a good-natured online debate at the time The Expendables 2 came out over whose career was the less expendable, Willis’, Stallone’s, or Schwartzenegger’s. Basically, the question was, Which one has made more movies that are real keepers. The answer is obviously Willis’. Stallone’s made some good movies. Arnold has too. But Willis has made a few more than either. (All three have made some incredible turkeys.) And he adds another to the list with Looper. But Willis has also delivered more truly fine performances (although Stallone’s underrated as an actor), and Old Joe may be his best yet. But, like I said, Looper is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s movie, and not just because it’s his Joe’s story.

I won’t argue that Looper’s going to make him a real star, his generation’s Clooney or Pitt (or Willis), next in line to Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, because how do I know. But I’ll bet if he does make that leap (or sticks it if he’s already in the middle of the jump), fans and critics in the future will point to Inception as the film in which the process began and to Looper as the movie that made his bones as a leading man.

I hope someone does a joint interview with Gordon-Levitt and Willis focusing on how they worked out playing the same character at the same time but goes beyond discussions of prosthetics and mimicking gestures and facial expressions. It doesn’t seem to me that I can discuss Gordon-Levitt’s and Willis’ performances apart from each other or discuss both together without giving too much way. But it’s safe to say this. Both share an admirable lack of vanity. Neither one gives way to any special pleading on behalf of Joe. There are no overt plays for the audience’s sympathy, no softening, no blunting of edges that are as ragged and sharp as the opening of an old-fashioned can top. What is rotten in Joe is rotten in him as a young man and stays rotten in him the rest of his life. The rottenness is as much a part of Gordon-Levitt’s Joe as it is of Willis’. So is the little enough, that’s just enough, of what’s decent.

I find it funny that three of my favorite leading ladies of all time are just entering their primes now. Amy Adams, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt. It seems odd that it may turn out that my all time favorites either had the best parts of their careers before I was born or during my old age. (There's probably a post in explaining how it happened that none of the leading ladies of my youth captured my heart or critical appreciation. Short answer: It took a long time for the Seventies to wear off. Shorter answer: Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand, and Woody Allen. Oh yeah. There's definitely a post here.) I've seen Blunt deliver three fine performances this year---in Wild Target, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and now Looper. Her cameo in The Muppets is a little gem too, although it's kind of an homage to her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada.

Blunt is developing the character actor disguised as a movie star trick of becoming a very different person in each new movie without looking any different. Adams can do this too. I think some of it is due to their both having, even though they are beautiful, cartoonish features---big eyes, wide mouths, comically cute noses. It takes the attention away from their prettiness and focuses it on their expressiveness. In Looper, Blunt is ingenue beautiful but what she makes us see is that her character is not. She's a farm girl turned party girl turned farmer in her own right who knows how to handle that shotgun.

As Abe, Joe's genial and psychologically seductive boss in the movie's present, Jeff Daniels is smart, good-natured, laid-back, slyly humorous, and so likeable you almost want him to be a good guy. It's even easy to imagine how in another movie Daniels could play a different character in the exact same way as a good guy. But Abe is a bad guy through and through. He's just a very level-headed and practical-minded one and persuasive to the point that he can sell a selfish surrender to doing the wrong thing as a form of virtue.

And Paul Dano and Noah Segan are very good in a thematically connected pair of supporting roles, Dano as Seth, Joe's weaselly pal who drags him into the mess that sets up the bigger mess Joe makes for himself, and Segan as Kid Blue, Abe's weaselly in his own way, too ambitious but emotionally as well as professionally insecure lieutenant. Both Seth and Kid Blue, without any self-awareness, are constantly begging for others to be aware of them as selves. They each want---and desperately need---to feel they have worth in at least one other person's eyes.

Which loops me back to where I started.

Looper is the first movie I've seen in a long time that's made me want to turn around and go back in the theater to watch it again. (Unlike as would have been the case with The Master, I'd have gone back for the pure fun of it, not because I felt I needed to re-take an exam.) It's a terrific thriller that also works as pretty good science fiction. But it's important to keep in mind that despite its sci-fi trappings it's still film noir. Which means it's basically a morality tale.

For those of you who are wondering, Johnson deals with the Grandfather Paradox of time travel by giving into it. But also by using it to address a moral point.

The question isn't how time travel works or why if it's possible time travelers aren't already among us changing history with their every butterfly-squashing step or if they are, how come we don't know it?

The question is what makes any individual life essential to the timeline?

Who could be erased from it without loss?

The better way to phrase it, though, is the way Looper finally does. What makes a life worth dying for or, even better, what makes one worth living for?

_________________________

I did my best with the spoilers. But be warned. I’m not going to scrub the comments clean of them. I’m asking folks to be careful and avoid giving away major surprises, but it’s hard to hold a real discussion of any movie without getting into any specifics. So if you haven’t seen Looper yet, you should probably avoid the comments until you have, which I’m assuming you will. See it, I mean. Which you should. See it. The movie. Help, I’m getting stuck in a loop!

Ok, the Firing Big Bird jokes stopped being funny sometime Saturday afternoon, hours before SNL bombed with their Big Bird sketch. The Obama ad's amusing, mildly, once, but I wish they hadn’t bothered. It’s kind of silly, really, and I’d rather see the Democrats running ads about Mitt’s more serious gaffe in the debate---and, yes, he did make a few, which Democrats and liberals should have pointed out right away, instead of collapsing into despair. Mitt admitted he plans to voucherize Medicare, for crying out loud! That should be an ad, if it’s not already. And a more straight-forward ad defending Sesame Street and with it PBS might have been all right. But I have to confess something.

I don’t like Big Bird.

Never did.

I was fine with Ernie, fine with Bert, fine with Grover, fine with Cookie Monster. Oscar still cracks me up, and I love the Count and love doing the Batty Bat. And I was more than fine with Kermit. I was down with Kermit. He was and still is the Frog!

But I’ve never been fine with Big Bird.

He’s annoying.

And cloying.

He’s annoying because he’s cloying.

I don’t much care for Elmo either. He’s even more annoying. And cloying.

Not that I want to see either Elmo or Big Bird fired. For the record, Mitt doesn't really want to fire them either. He wants to put them to work in the private sector making money for millionaires, which Mitt believes in the whole purpose of life for people and muppets.

I'm just saying that I'm not the target for those ads. watching them i feel a liitle---just a little---like Scrooge perusing the Toys R Us catalog.

But then I didn't grow up with Sesame Street. I'm a Captain Kangaroo kid. By the time Sesame Street premiered I was off to school. Oh, I saw it enough times. On days off and when I was home sick I'd watch with my little brothers and sisters. But I was a Muppet fan and I watched for the Muppets and I didn't consider Big Bird and Elmo true Muppets.

So of course the ads don't touch any deep chords in me. The nostalgia that I do feel isn't for my own kidhood but for my kids' kidhoods. They did grow up with Big Bird.

But here's the thing.

They did not grow up with Sesame Street.

Not in the usual way, that is.

They knew about Sesame Street. They knew all the characters. Young Ken doesn't remember how he felt about Big Bird or Elmo except that they didn't annoy him. His favorites were Bert and Ernie and Cookie Monster. Oliver was a fan of both. He loved Elmo. (To his parents' great relief, he outgrew this before any Tickle Me Elmos cloyed their way into our house.) But they knew the Sesame Street Muppets as the stars of videos and the travelling live shows that came to town every year. They didn’t watch Sesame Street itself regularly. Hardly ever in fact. There are reasons for this that were mainly accidental. One was that without thinking about it the blonde and I discouraged them from building their days around watching TV. Another, related to the first, is that thanks to our schedules when they were very little both the blonde and I were home during the mornings. When Sesame Street was on, they were often doing things with one or the other or both of us.

Not always fun stuff. We dragged them about on errands. But mostly we were able to spend what was known then as quality time. (Has that cliche died the death it deserved?) We had a nice backyard with a swingset and a sandbox where they could play on sunny days, chasing the clouds away. There was a branch library within easy strollering distance. Our house was full of books and they did not lack for toys.

But it's not as if they never watched TV.

What they mostly watched, however, was videos, and the Sesame Street videos were not among their very favorites. They preferred videos with big trucks and toy trains and, oh , how I still miss Thomas and his friends. The sight of that little blue tank engine can make me tear up way faster and easier than yellow feathers or red fur.

(Warning to young parents. There are things you'll be happy to see your kids outgrow. But there are other things that will break your heart all the rest of your life.)

How many kids don't grow up with the company of both parents for large portions of their days or even with one around? How many don't have nice backyards to play in? How many don't live in neighborhoods where it's a pleasant walk to the library? How many don't get to attend schools with good early education programs and all-day kindergartens? How many kids grow up with Big Bird whose parents can't afford to take them to Sesame Street Live or can't get a weeknight off to take them?

I'm not surprised that Right Wingers sneer and snark at the Firing Big Bird thing. But it bothers me that many liberals are so dismissive too.

It doesn't surprise me, though, that by far the majority of liberals I've seen being dismissive are men.

Sesame Street is the first introduction to learning English for many immigrant families. For many inner city families it is one of the few shows on television that reflect their lives and neighborhoods and cultures and heritage and selves in a positive light.

And let’s not forget that along with everything else they want to take away from working families, the Republicans have it in for Head Start and before and after school programs too.

What's more, people of all sorts and conditions grew up with Sesame Street, loving Big Bird and Elmo and the rest. Their kids are growing up with it now. It means something to them, and not just in a trivial or sentimental way. It is an important part of childhood because it helps teach children not just to read and to count but to be as decent and kind and loving as Big Bird and Elmo.

For countless families, Sesame Street plays a key part in raising children.

And, guys? Guess who do the lioness' share of that job?

____________________

Like I said, when I was growing up I watched Sesame Street mostly in passing. It was a show for little kids. But I’ll tell you what I did watch attentively, even though I might have been embarrassed to let my friends know, if I didn’t know some of them were watching it too.

Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

It was on late in the afternoons so I could catch it after school. I never turned it on for myself, of course. But I would remind my brothers and sisters that it was time. Then I’d sit down and watch with them, just to be a good and obliging big brother.

It wasn’t that Mr Rogers was a hero to me, but he was something…special. A saint, maybe? I could write a whole post trying to explain it, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be as good as this essay by Tom Junod, to whom Fred Rogers was a hero.

It’s long. You might want to book mark and save it for when you can give it your full attention. It’s that good.

Once again I’m reduced to a cultural cliche. Usually it happens in a New Yorker cartoon.

BOSTON—The twigs and acorns crunching pleasurably beneath his boots, Mr. Autumn Man Dennis Clemons, 32, reportedly strolled down Massachusetts Avenue on Wednesday wearing a gray sweater over a plaid collared shirt as he cradled a cup of pumpkin-spiced coffee and relished the crisp October morning.

“Nothing beats autumn in New England,” said His Excellency, the Duke of Fall, who began the day swaddled in a warm flannel blanket, gazing out the window at the golden-hued landscape, as is his custom this time of year. “Everywhere the leaves are changing and the temperature is starting to drop off. You can smell it in the air.”

“Tonight it may even dip into the 30s,” added the cozy autumnal personage, who at several points wrapped both hands around his warm container of coffee and inhaled deeply. “Perfect weather for building a fire.”

Mr. Fall, who sources speculate loves Thanksgiving, butternut squash soup, homecoming parades, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” apple-picking, and haunted hayrides, emerges reliably every year around this time in his traditional uniform, sometimes alternating his iconic sweater with a fleece vest or pullover.

Right down to the fleece vest. Oy. To claim some measure of unique personahood here: I don’t like pumpkin-spiced coffee or anything but coffee-spiced coffee and at the end of the season I don’t metamorphose into Mr Wintertime Asshole Man.

WASHINGTON — A stranger recently telephoned Carolyn Thomas to ask how old she was when her father died. Twenty-three, she replied.

“Oh, you knew him!” the man, greatly impressed, responded. Thomas could only laugh.

For sports fans in this city, Thomas’s father, Walter Johnson, remains royalty 85 years after his sidearm fastball last whizzed past a helpless batter and 66 years since his death. The Washington Senators’ pitching ace, Johnson won 417 games, the second most in baseball history, and his 3,509 strikeouts stood as a major league record until 1983. The Big Train, as he was known, retains numerous baseball career marks, with perhaps the most impressive being his throwing 110 shutouts and 531 complete games in 21 seasons, all with Washington.

Late in Johnson’s career, the Senators brought home the capital’s lone World Series championship. Johnson pitched the final four innings of the decisive seventh game in 1924, a 12-inning 4-3 victory over the New York Giants on Oct. 10. His other two World Series wins came in 1925, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the title in seven games.

Johnson’s Senators played in the American League and later moved to Minnesota, and a second Senators team moved to Texas a decade later. Now, Washington is in the National League and its Nationals will play here Wednesday afternoon in Game 3 of their division series against St. Louis. It will be the first postseason baseball in this city in 79 years, and Johnson’s daughter, now 89, is following along avidly.

The little girl turned great-grandmother represents one of the last direct connections to her father’s life. Her only remaining sibling, Edwin, died at 94 in August. According to the Baseball Hall of Fame, no one is alive now who played in the major leagues when Johnson pitched and managed.

Thomas watches many Nationals games on television and reads newspaper articles about the team, which relocated here from Montreal in 2005. A color photograph of the rookie outfielder Bryce Harper graces her living room mantel, next to a stuffed-eagle doll in a Nationals uniform. On a nearby bookshelf rests a baseball signed by the team’s former first baseman Dmitri Young. “You are the sweetest lady,” Young wrote on it.

“Harper’s exciting. He makes things happen. He’s a little spark plug,” Thomas, with a twinkle in her eye, told a visitor one recent afternoon. “Davey Johnson,” she said of the Nationals’ manager, “he’s a baseball man. He knows the game.”

Ken Burns didn’t tell me this! Johnson was widowed young and he raised his five kids plus two of his deceased sister’s kids on his own. I’d like to know how he managed during the season when the team was on the road. Well, as we know, nobody does it all alone. His mother helped, and the story doesn’t go into it, but a photo caption suggests Johnson married again. Guess I need to read the biography his grandson wrote.

Something else I wish the reporter had asked Thomas. Did her father think of himself as playing for the Senators or the Nationals? That’s a real question.

The Times has a nice slide show that goes with the story, When Washington Cheered a Winner, but the photo above is courtesy of the Library of Congress. It’s undated and the little girl Johnson’s holding in that giant glove isn’t identified, but it could be his daughter Carolyn.

When sad but sympathetic Canadian historians write the history of the decline of Canada’s once great democratic neighbor to the South into a theocratic kleptocracy, they are going to note how the U.S. press helped in that decline by spending thirty years flattering the Radical Religious Right as just regular Americans, a tad conservative, perhaps, maybe a little eccentric, in some cases, but basically good, patriotic, God-fearing Christian folk instead of calling them out as the sex-obsessed, medieval-minded, hate-filled pack of sadistic, joyless, reactionary, and racist yahoos they really were.

A candidate for the Arkansas legislature, Charlie Fuqua, says children who don’t demonstrate “respect for parents” should be put to death, the Arkansas Times reports. Fuqua is a former member of the Arkansas legislature and has received support from the Arkansas Republican Party and two sitting members of Congress.

Police knew [“Curley” Baynes] as an old-school fighter. One officer complained Baynes cracked his vertebrae in 1991 during a fight. Officers had responded to a harassment complaint and ended up in a brawl. They pressed assault charges, and Baynes countered with claims officers smashed his face into a brick wall and clubbed him. A jury dismissed the assault charges at trial.

Paul Weber remembers the day he saw Baynes leaving a neighbor's house with sacks-full of jewelry. Weber, a former college wrestler, was starting his career with Newburgh police at the time. Weber was off-duty, but he chased the bigger man for blocks on South Street before Baynes got tired of running.

"He just turns and squares off in the middle of the street," Weber said. "He fought like a champ, and I was right there with him."

Curley’s friends remember him as “good at heart,” the kind of guy who “baked cookies for friends.”

I never boxed. I’ve never been to the fights. I can’t remember the last fight I watched on TV. I’m not a particular fan of watching people bleed. If you pressed me, I’d admit to having moral qualms about the sport. But for some reason I love reading about it.

“Some” reason?

I know the reason.

After baseball, boxing inspires the best sportswriting.

Newspapers, magazines, books, doesn’t matter, it’s almost all good and a lot of it’s great. There are probably some terrific boxing blogs out there, I just haven’t found them yet.

Baseball, like I said, inspires the best in sportswriters. (The worst too, but never mind.) Then boxing. Then golf, then horseracing, two other sports I’ve never had much interest in outside of reading about them. Next is basketball, although that seems to be more the province of newspapers and magazines. I can’t think of many great basketball books. And, finally, football. And high school football more than college or pro.

Of course, it’s probably just a reflection of my preferences. I’d rather read about baseball and boxing so, without thinking about it, I’ll reach for a book about one or the other without even considering books about other sports, so I’m sure I’ve missed out on a lot of excellent football books over the years, and tennis books, hockey books, jai alai, lacrosse, and synchronized swimming books, as well. God knows how many fine articles I’ve skipped.

But I’ve got reasons for thinking this judgment may be objective. Football is just very hard to write well about.

First the way the football’s played complicates narrative and description. Things happen too fast and at too great a distance and over too wide an area for spectators (including coaches, players on the bench, and reporters in the press box) to take in all at once what's happening on any given play. And they happen too fast but too close in for the players on the field to see much going on besides what's right in front of them. This means that the "story" of a touchdown or a sack or an interception or a key injury has to be pieced together afterwards from the reports of too many eyewitnesses or from or at least with help from watching the tape. This can be done and done well, but mostly the result reads like a police report.

But it's also the case that more than other sports football emphasizes strategy and violence, and both topics are inherently dull to read about. Strategy because it easily degenerates into sheer wonkery. Violence because it gets repetitive.

The two football books in my dogpile reflect that. Undefeated is really a biography of Don Shula, telling the story of his life in the context of a single season, and Shula was one of the thinkingest coaches of his time. The Last Headbangers chronicles the period when strategically thinking coaches like Shula completely took over the play on the field, but the 70s were also when football became extremely popular as television entertainment, a spectacle more than a sport, and, as Cook tells it, violence became the main attraction in that spectacle.

Freeman and Cook handle this pretty well, keeping the wonkery and the violence to a minimum and folding both into the construction of their narrative arcs, but it still hampers their writing.

Fortunately, both writers avoid another trap. Nevermind the talk about heart and character that creeps into all sportswriting and sentimenlizes the most cynical writers' prose. For a lot of fans and players and coaches, football is about will. The essential spirit of the game expresses itself in power and the will to dominate. This isn't what I like about the game. In fact, it's what keeps me from loving it anywhere near as much as I love baseball. I don't even think it's necessary to appreciating football as a sport as opposed to a spectacle. But it's there, whether I like it or not. It excuses the violence. Worse, it encourages celebration of the violence. Watching thugs inflict pain on each other becomes the point. Writers who accept this as intrinsic to the game, even resignedly, as well as writers who are seduced by it, become dull and stupid in a hurry. And they resort to cliches more often and easily to help them disguise what they're doing, which is either apologizing for bullies or out and out cheerleading for them.

At any rate, I think the emphasis on strategy, violence, and power leads to too much analysis, editorializing, and rah-rahing in place of storytelling.

But there's one more thing that gets in the way of strong storytelling. The nature of the work itself.

There simply isn't time for people in the game to stand around telling each other stories.

It's not just that the games themselves are so fast and furious. The season is compressed compared to other sports, some of which---golf, tennis, boxing, horseracing---don't have real seasons, they have cycles, and go on all year. Baseball practically does too, now that the World Series can finish in November.

And the football work week is intense. Game days are hard, but so are the workdays in between. It's non-stop study and drill.

Now think about how much time over the courses of their long seasons people working in other sports spend standing or sitting around with nothing to do or doing work that doesn't require their full attention or concentrated physical effort. For baseball players that includes long stretches during their games. And what are they doing while standing around? Waiting, mostly. For their turn in the batting cage. For the next race to start. For the champ to finish his road work.

That gives them a lot of time to talk.

(On the golf course you're expected to do your waiting in near silence, but then there's all that time walking to the next hole.)

Which is what they do, talk. They talk shop, of course. But, mainly, they shoot the breeze, one way or another, exchanging news, catching up, gossiping---telling stories. And all this chatter is very helpful to someone planning to write about any of these sports, because what are sportswriters, after all?

Journalists.

Reporters.

Tellers of other people's stories.

Reporters are dependent on their sources, and the better their sources are at telling them about themselves, what they do, what goes on around them how they go about their jobs, the better they are at telling stories, the more and the better the material the writer has to work with when re-telling those stories to readers.

No way I'm suggesting that football players and coaches aren't as intelligent about their sport. In fact, I'd bet just the opposite. But I think players and coaches and trainers and other workers in other sports are more practiced in explaining what they do in the form of stories, because a lot of the point even when they're talking shop is to entertain each other while passing the time. They learn to illustrate their points with anecdotes and gossip and jokes and comparisons and the occasional tall tale, and this shows up in the reporting.

In the writing.

Because people enjoy a good story, smart storytellers learn how to craft a rattling good yarn. Over time and many re-tellings, they refine and revise their own stories. They also collect other storytellers' stories and pass them along. And when you collect stories, you collect characters along with them. And characters bring with the m their own unique voices.

(Storytellers also learn how to turn themselves into characters in their own stories.)

It seems to me that this is the big difference between writing about football and writing about other sports, particularly baseball and boxing.

Writing about football is full of personalities, usually outsized ones. Writing about baseball and boxing is full of characters.

Joe Namath was a personality.

Ty Cobb was a character.

And this is the case with Undefeated and The Last Headbangers. Both books feature lively biographical sketches but there are more personalities---like Mercury Morris in Undefeated, John Madden and John Matuszak in The Last Headbangers---and few characters, like Cus D'Amato in the Floyd Patterson biography or Battling Nelson, Eubie Blake, and Joe Gans' mother in The Longest Fight.

The most character-like character in The Last Headbangers isn't a player or a coach. He's a professional storyteller. Howard Cosell.

Which may explain why the best part of that book deals with the rise of Monday Night Football.

Now it may be that baseball and boxing simply attract more characters, that the athletes themselves and their coaches and the people who surround them and gravitate to the sport tend to be eccentrics. I don't know. What I do know is that the parade of eccentrics is longer and more colorful in the books I've read about baseball and boxing. Which explains my preference. Which explains why I read more about them. And which probably explains how I've missed out on a lot of great football writing. I don't expect to find what I love to find in writing about baseball and other sports.

So, your turn: I'm working on reviews of all the books above, and not this week but starting the week after it's going to be rather sports heavy around here. This week's going to feature vice-presidential candidates and movie star dogs. Meantime, if you have any recommendations not just for good football writing but good sportswriting period, please leave a comment.

I didn’t watch. For one thing: baseball. For another: boring. But mainly: I knew Mitt was going to “win”. The Media was never going to let him “lose.” The only way he could have lost is if he finished up crumpled on the floor behind the podium, whimpering “Make it stop! Please, God, make it stop!” Which wasn’t going to happen. Even if it did, the press corps still might have declared him the “winner” because they needed him to be in order for them to go back to their “It’s a toss up” narrative. If last night couldn’t have been described in any way favorable to Mitt as a “game-changer”, the press would have nothing to do for the next month but duck calls from their Republican sources demanding to know why they weren’t reporting on how the game had changed in Mitt’s favor.

That said, though. Mitt won.

Handily, apparently.

Worse. The President lost.

But from all I’ve read online it looks to me like this:

1) Mitt won the debate but nobody much likes him for it.

2) The President lost the debate and Democrats are really pissed at him.

3) Nobody's vote was changed.

4) Mitt won by being the kind of jerk most people already think he is. My bet is that women were especially put off.

5) The President lost by being a stiff and by looking and acting bored stiff. Like I said, this pissed off Democrats, didn't change their votes.

6) The worst part for Democrats and the best for GOP is that the Media will spend the next week asking each other if the debate was a game changer.

Is that about right?

All right, so…bad news. But we live to fight another day.

What I’d like to see, though, is liberal women taking control of that fight. We men are too well-trained by sports coverage. For us it’s always about power and dominance. This is why every single loss by the hometown team sends us into panic, depression, or a rage. But women know this guy.

Mitt did to the President and Jim Lehrer what types like him do to the women they work with every day. Interrupted, condescended, bullied. These guys pretend not to hear you, then they repeat what you said as if they just thought of it themselves.

Mitt broke the rules last night. From the start he played it like he owned it. And he lied non-stop. And the President just stood there and let him get away with it, possibly because, like so many women who find themselves dealing with a Mitt in their midst, he was reluctant to speak up because it would have seemed impolite or…uppity.

In the President’s case it might have been that he’s trained himself too well not to give anyone an excuse to dismiss him as an angry black man.

For a lot of women, it’s the case that they know if they try to assert themselves they will be told they’re being…bitches.

And the trouble is that the men around them who know the Mitts in their midst are being jerks don’t speak up because they’ve been cowed into thinking this is how the game is played.

But who says the rules can’t be changed?

Mitt won last night by being a liar, a bully, and an all-around jerk. That should be the story.

Updated cuz I just thought of it: To reiterate, we men know what Mitt did was despicable but we’re of no help because we think that’s how the game is played. But this too: we want to show off how well we understand that’s how the game is played. So all we’re going to do is going explain over and over again how Mitt won and the President lost. Shows we’re savvy and tough-minded, see? Make us stop!

Former major league fireball pitcher turned scout for the Boston Red Sox, Johnny Flanagan (Justin Timberlake), and his mentor, Atlanta Braves scout Gus Lobel (Clint Eastwood), wait for Gus’ lawyer daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) to realize true happiness isn’t to be found in a relationship with her cell phone in the anti-mobile device, pro-baseball movie Trouble With the Curve.

Sorry. I've got to do this. We're talking baseball here, after all.

Trouble With the Curve serves itself up 80 mph fastballs thrown right down the center of the plate then sprays the field with bloop singles, slow rollers that somehow scoot past the shortstop, lazy flies the wind carries over the outfielders’ heads, and a few sharply hit singles to deep right that it manages to stretch into doubles. Runs score, but there's a reason they call this small ball.

That's it. I'm better now.

So...I liked it. I had a good time. It's not great or even close to great. It's sentimental. It's predictable. Its attitude towards baseball is so nostalgic that the characters might as well enter and exit through a cornfield, and even so it's not smart about the game or the business behind the game. It tries too hard to make us root for its main characters, as if anybody's ever going to root against Clint. It's a comedy about relatively ordinary people who have interesting jobs but the fate of the world doesn't depend on their doing those jobs, which shouldn't matter, but the script doesn't trust us to care so the stakes are raised to a soap opera level of emotional manipulation.

It's not enough that Gus Lobel, the aging baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves played by Clint Eastwood, has to prove he can still do his job despite failing eyesight. He has to prove it by making the most important decision he's been called on to make in the last twenty years of his long and storied career with the future of the ballclub depending on him getting it right. It's not enough that his lawyer daughter Mickey has to take a week off from work at an inconvenient time to take care of him. She has to be in the middle of the biggest case of her budding career and on the brink of making partner. It's not enough that father and daughter aren't getting along lately because old age is getting to Gus, making him cranky, selfish, and unpredictable or that Mickey's been so caught up in her work that she hasn't been making time to visit her lonely and frightened old man. It has to be that she's been fighting for his attention, affection, and approval since her mother died twenty-seven years ago, breaking Gus' heart for all time and causing him to withdraw into himself and pull away from Mickey out of fear of losing her too and this might be their last chance to reconcile and put things right between them but it will depend on whether he can make that big decision and how she handles that big case.

Then there's the superfluous love interest whose main purpose is to give Amy Adams someone to play off of who's under sixty years old in the person of Justin Timberlake but who the script wants us to believe is Mickey's one last chance to find true love.

Wisely, director Robert Lorenz downplays the melodrama and keeps the focus on what’s realistic or at least more realistic. He lets the story unfold at an easy-going pace and has his actors playing it low key as if it’s all just another day in the life. And he’s well-aware that the audience didn’t come to admire his flashy direction or even for the story.

We’re here to see Clint.

One of the most admirable things about Eastwood’s performance is the lack of vanity. It goes beyond his willingness to let his age show. He plays Gus as an old man. Not a man getting old. Old. Old and being taken apart by old by old age.

Generally, he avoids the pathos inherent in watching a once vigorous hero now grown tired and frail and goes for self-deprecating humor. I loved the scowl and the angry look around when he puts in his hearing aid as if the first thing he's expecting to hear is some wiseass punk making fun of him, although the only thing anyone's going to find odd is that look and nobody but Gus himself thinks there's anything shameful about an old man needing a hearing aid, and he follows that up with an embarrassed frown as he realizes that. He has a different and more vulnerable but just as amusing way of putting on his glasses---alert, nervous, tense, and ready to jump, as if the first thing he expects to see is a hard hit foul ball already inches away from his face.

But Eastwood shows us Gus’ fear too. And his rage. And his growing self-disgust.

Gus is afraid of dying, of course, but that’s still well down the line, or so he’s probably assuring himself. Right now what he’s afraid of is getting hurt, physically and psychically. It’s bad enough that he’s tripping over things and bumping into them and that he has trouble backing his car out of the garage. He’s more and more reluctant to leave the house because he’s afraid he’ll humiliate himself in large and small ways. He’s foggy about things he used to pride himself on seeing clearly. He’s easily disoriented. He hates the probability that he’ll be having more and more senior moments, but he’s genuinely terrified those moments are the beginnings of something worse to come. And he can’t stand the grumpy, mean, and withdrawn old coot he sees himself turning into. He’s very close to wishing for it all to just be over and done with.

It’s a lovely, sad, and frightening performance. It would be depressing, if Trouble With the Curve wasn’t a comedy and a sentimental one, at that.

We can count on relief being just one tender moment away.

Gus Lobel appears to be a man hopelessly stuck in the past. He drives a vintage Mustang. When he visits his wife’s grave, he brings her a picnic lunch with beer and talks to her as if she’s right there with him. He refuses to use a computer, even to read newspapers online. Dead tree editions from all over the country, presumably mailed to him, are stacking up on his kitchen table. This means his information about what prospects are doing in their games is always days and even weeks out of date, a problem for a baseball scout in this day and age, and a real unlikelihood. Forget the movie Moneyball, which suggests no one in baseball learned how to use a spreadsheet before Billy Beane showed them how in 2001. Computers have been a regular scouting and coaching tool for at least twenty-five years. Davey Johnson, now managing the Washington Nationals into the playoffs, was using them back in his playing days with the Baltimore Orioles in the 1960s. Gus would have gotten used to using one a long time ago, at least to read the sports pages and send email. It would have been good if we’d been given clues that Gus wasn’t stuck in the past but had retreated into it, better if there were signs that Gus had just quit trying to keep up with the times---an unused DVR, a desktop with a dialup internet connection, a very unsmart phone dating from 2003. Instead he seems to be a cliche, the man from a simpler time still doing it the good old fashioned way. Except that Gus' prime would have been the 60s,70s, and 80s, hardly simpler times but also times when the business of baseball changed radically. If Gus was the type to be left behind, he'd have been left behind back then.

What Gus is, though, is a symbol or rather his refusal to rely on a computer is symbolic.

Defending the way he’s been doing his job, Gus says the kinds of things about character, heart, the five tools, and the intangibles that are made to sound ridiculous when they’re spouted by the scouts in Moneyball. They don’t sound ridiculous here---or as ridiculous---because Gus isn’t really talking about baseball or computers.

Trouble With the Curve isn’t about baseball, really. It’s about what it takes to be human and happy, which is a personal and physical connection with other people.

In a movie not over-long on irony, the ironic thing for Gus is that the good he symbolizes, our need to be involved in each other’s lives, is what he’s in the process of rejecting. He doesn’t need a computer to put between himself and companionship. He has his front door.

His tragedy is that he has taught his daughter to keep other people at a safe, impersonal, and manageable distance too. (Her smart phone is the too pat symbol of this accelerating tendency.) So here we have a movie about two people withdrawing from life who have pretty much no one left to turn to but each other pushing each other away.

Mickey---she’s named after Mickey Mantle, one of Gus’ favorite ballplayers of all time. Considering the organization he works for, she’s lucky she’s not named Hank.---is played by Amy Adams and if anybody can make us root against Clint it’s her. What decent-hearted father would push away such a bright, spunky, cutie pie of a daughter determined to love him in spite of himself? Mickey is a practical-minded person, a born problem-solver, but in her father she’s been presented with a problem she can’t solve because it has no practical solution. She’s a hard-charging careerist, which in a Hollywood movie is usually something that needs to be fixed. You’re supposed to put family ahead of your job, if you’re truly a good person. But Adams makes us see that Mickey is a responsible adult who happens to have other responsibilities besides looking after Gus, responsibilities to her firm, to her clients, and to herself. Adams puts us on Mickey’s side without any self-righteousness or special pleading. It’s very clear that she wants to do right by Gus but she’s correct in thinking he should also do right by her and that he's being irresponsible by forcing her to choose between him and her other responsibilities and what makes it worse is that he’s pushing her to make the choice she least wants to make, her job over him and herself. No wonder she’s mad at him. She makes us mad at him too.

A great thing about Clint Eastwood is how generous he’s always been towards his co-stars and supporting players. He’s glad to to step back and let them have the screen. He regularly disappears from Trouble With the Curve to let Adams have the movie to herself and Adams and Timberlake take it over together for long stretches of time. And in his scenes with the old character actors who play Gus’ cronies and friendly rival scouts, he’s content to sit quietly reacting while they’re having fun with the best lines and jokes.

Those old character actors---Chelcie Ross, Raymond Anthony Thomas, and Ed Lauter---and the ones who play the partners at Mickey’s law firm---George Wyner, Bob Gunton, and Jack Gilpin---are, taken together, one of Trouble With the Curve’s saving graces. But Timberlake is an amiable and enlivening presence, although I didn’t buy him as a former major league pitcher---a singles-hitting utility infielder up once or twice up from the minors for a cup of coffee, maybe. John Goodman is warm and welcome company. Robert Patrick, as the Braves’ general manager, has very few lines but his glowering speaks eloquently---here’s an extremely smart guy taking in everything you say and even more than you know you’re saying and wondering not all that patiently when you’re going to get around to telling him something he hasn’t already figured out ahead of you. And as Gus’ nemesis in the Braves’ home office, a computer-dependent super-striver with a lizard grin who seems to resent and look down on everyone on the general principle that they are not him, Matthew Lillard continues to develop a type he introduced in The Descendents, the smug, self-satisfied, too smart for his own good over-achiever who thinks his abilities and successes entitle him to your affection and approval even when he’s deliberately acting like a jerk.

Like I said. Not great. And not even really a baseball movie. But it’s got heart. It’s got character. If it doesn’t have all five tools, it’s got enough of the intangibles.

And, if he’s not kidding us, it’s Clint’s last acting job, and he’s finishing up with grace.

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Most of the baseball that gets played in Trouble With the Curve gets played on fields in North Carolina and I’m told by Twitter phenom Teresa Kopec, who hails from that neck of the woods, that the movie gets the look and the feel and character of the area just right.